Quotes from Amity Gaige

I do think, in general, children are so perceptive, and they watch and they get so much, and that's wonderful. And it's also difficult for them because they see so much, but they don't understand.

I often read poetry to 'warm up' before I write.

As separate people, we are weak, but we could be a peaceful, powerful nation.

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.

Let's admit it; the only use for complaining is to make people laugh.

Parenthood is a psychic sweat lodge: enter into it only if you are ready to have your own secreted toxins running into your eyes. Few people are prepared for its power - women or men.

I often heard Latvians compare Russia and America. Latvians find both countries and their leaders possessed of the same mysterious confidence.

Be happy. Decide to be happy. If you want to be happy, be happy! No one cares if you're happy or not, so why wait for permission? And did it really matter if you had been deeply unhappy in your past? Who but you remembered that?

Complaining is a form of taking.

We're just a hyphen between our parents and our kids. That's what you learn in middle age. Mostly this is something a mature person can live with. But every once in a while you just want to send up a flare. I too am here! Everybody is sympathetic until you try and make your minuscule life interesting and then they're like, What's wrong with you? You think you're special?

Every marriage needs one skeptic to keep it safe. But a marriage of two skeptics will fail to thrive.

Here's what I want to say to the other side, to the Righteous Left, to the Easily Injured and Offended: You say you want concessions/changes/social justice, but let's admit it, you are never going to quit.

Because love is tidal; it goes out, it comes in, it goes out.

Everyone is hard to love, if you do it for long enough.

I'm not "depressed," she said. Besides, I hate that word. OK, what should we call it? She fluffed the pillow behind her back, indignant. I'm very faithful to my problems.

After Georgie, something had changed in our marriage, and there was nowhere solid to put the blame. We were almost forty, and simultaneously our marriage had - I don' know - thickened, agglutinated, become oatmeal-like. Differences between us that had once provided sparks now seemed inefficient. Was there love? Yes, yes - but at the margins. At the center, there was administration.

I could never give it a name, my condition. I would have said, "I'm depressed," if that had felt sufficient. But I felt more than depressed. I felt that I was depression. A swallowed woman.

Look at the care we take w/ our secrets, when we're so sloppy w/ everything else.

Fatigue overtakes me, and a grief so concentrated I swim in it. A grief that makes my arms heavy. A grief that makes my back slump. A grief that makes me close my eyes. I want to sleep like the unborn and the dead. I want to sleep so deeply that I see him again. I want to confront him. Who were you? I want to say. Why do you talk to me now? I want to shake his inert body. But what's the use? Our losses will never be done with us. They have endless patience.

He leaned down & he said, Michael, I will tell you honestly because you've been honest with me, that what you want is a holy human right, and you shouldn't just give it up. I humored him. I said, What right, Harry? The right to feel the burden of carrying your own life. Just you and your family and your boat. No crutches, no excuses.

Where does a mistake begin?" his wife asks at the start of the book. "Did my mistake begin with the boat? Or my marriage itself?

We say we want kids to be joyful/unmaterialistic/resilient. That's what sailing kids are like. They climb masts & can correctly identify obscure plant life. They don't care what somebody looks like when they meet them, they sometimes don't even speak the same language, but they work it out. They don't sit around ranking one kind of life against another.

Michael and I both recognized we had problems, we just couldn't agree on the solution. I think what was happening was, I wasn't just talking about the implausible plan to walk away from our house and the kids' schools and Michael's job, no matter how assured we would be of getting these things back. I was wondering, whether we were to go or to stay, what would we do— about us?

You think this will solve all our problems. It's magical thinking, Michael. It's the way a child thinks.